a normally strong woman. We lived in the country. My husband looked
after the servants, and if we were without a cook for several days he
filled her place (he had learned to cook "camping out" and liked
nothing better) until my mother-in-law sent a woman from San
Francisco. I read, strolled about the woods, storing up vitality but
often depressed with the unutterable ennui of youth, and haunted with
the fear that my story-telling faculty, which had been very
pronounced, had deserted me.

When my husband died I had but one child. I left her with her two
adoring grandmothers and fled to New York. I was still as callow as a
boarding-school girl, but my saving grace was that I knew I did not
know anything, that I never would know enough to write about life
until I had seen more of it than was on exhibition in California.

But by that time my health was established. I felt quite equal to
writing six books a year if any one would publish them, besides
studying life at first hand as persistently and deeply as the present
state of society will permit in the case of a mere woman. For that
reason I shall always be sorry I did not go on a newspaper for a year
as a reporter, as there is no other way for a woman to see life in all
its phases. I had a letter to Charles Dana, owner of the New York
_Sun_, and no doubt he would have put me to work, but I was still too
pampered, or too snobbish, and, lacking the spur of necessity, missed
one of the best of educations. Now, no matter who asks my advice in
regard to the literary career, whether she is the ambitious daughter
of a millionaire or a girl whose talent is for the story and whose
future depends upon herself, I invariably give her one piece of
advice: "Go on a newspaper. Be a reporter. Refuse no assignment. Be
thankful for a merciless City Editor and his blue pencil. But, if you
feel that you have the genuine story-telling gift, save your money and
leave at the end of a year, or two years at most."

As for myself, I absorbed life as best I could, met people in as many
walks of life as possible. As I would not marry again, and, in
consequence, had no more children, nor suffered from the wearing
monotonies of domestic life, I have always kept my health and been
equal to an immense amount of work.

But the point is that I had been sheltered and protected during my
delicate years. No doubt it was a part of my destiny to hand on the
intensely American qualities of body and mind I